Thursday, July 19, 2012

Murder, She thought - Part 2

I still remember that fateful night, I relive it every day.
Like a slapping scene on a Soap Opera it keeps repeating on and on. Every time
I took a step and it pained, every time I looked into the mirror, every time
Naresh introduced me to someone and he went from his name to Oh ….

We were an insane couple who were insanely young and
insanely in love with each other. It was when Kavita was 6 years old; we had
left her with the neighbor and finally had some time to ourselves. It was the
welcome party for his friend who had left India for USA and had to come back
when the dot com bubble burst. As any America returned he was full of energy,
the idea that India was shit and good Bourbon.

And Naresh had plenty of it;
every time I asked him to slow down he sped up. He was drunk and driving his
new bike that he bought with the royalty cheque. We were giggling like school
children and I punched him in the arm every time he sped up. I remember my
laugh, because that was the last time I ever laughed. It was over in a flash,
it was blind turn and he got a car coming in from the side, I saw a headlight
in my eyes and in the next second I heard was scratching, like metal sliding on
metal. And then nothing.

I woke up in some place which looked like a hospital. Naresh
was crying, the first time I had seen him like that and he swore on my life
never to drink again. He didn’t have a scratch on him, while I had tubes
running in & out of me everywhere. I had one tube going in my mouth, one
coming out of crotch and the third coming out of my arm. The mouth one fed me
food, the crotch one took it out and the arm one sent things through me to
lessen the pain. Morphine they kept feeding me, just enough to make the pain
tolerable, not enough to make life tolerable. I had the same dream every night,
Naresh pushed me off a building and I fell screaming, screaming until I
couldn’t scream anymore. Then there was this silence, a tranquility like no
other, an agreement reached with death, then there we no worries, no anger, no
pain, just the spirit of being in the moment. And then I used to wake up. Why
do our dreams never continue after death, why doesn’t anyone see this life, the
life which is better than life?

After 3 months I was released from the hospital with a stern
warning not to look in the mirror. I limped my way through my daughter with
extended arms, though the ‘Welcome Home’ sign, through everything which was supposed
to make me feel better. I limped directly to the mirror where I saw my
disfigured face, they had tried their best to stitch my face, but it was worse
than the worst patch job I had even seen. I had a scar and stich marks running across
my face and the right leg which didn’t work well as it had lots of plates and
screws in it. I was asked not to walk too much, not to pass through a metal
detector and to see a Physiotherapist. I didn’t do the first or the last.

I took a job in an IT company near my house as an Accounting
consultant and gave up on my dream of being a financial advisor, I took a desk
job where I didn’t have to travel at all, and I used to walk to and back from
my office and hardly ever saw the Physiotherapist assigned. It was a shit life and
I got used to very fast. Naresh used to apologize to me every night and he used
to mean it, he tried to kiss the scar on my face but I pushed him away, I
closed my eyes and waited for him to push me off the roof. I wanted his love
instead of pity. I wanted to pretend that this never happened, instead of
coming to terms with it, but looking into his eyes always made me remember, so
I stopped looking into his eyes. After a while my cynicism won and he stopped
trying; trying to apologize, trying to reach out to me in spite of my sarcasm
and anger, trying to pose in front of my daughter that it was all right.

We had finally become the couple we were always supposed to
be, broken, bitter and non-believing. Only Kavita kept us together, the 6 year
old girl who used to walk around with her Barbie was soon transformed into a 16
year old discontented child who used to walk out on during arguments, family
outings and us in general. “If you two can’t live with each other, how can you
expect me to?”, her words.

But even after all this she was my greatest regret, greatest
regret of dying. Leaving her alone in this world. She was a typical 16 year
old, angry, insecure, illusioned, and worrying over pimples and hair
extensions. I wanted to tell her that all this will pass, and life’s biggest
worries have not even crossed her mind yet. But I don’t think she will listen
to me, like all teenagers she also thinks her parents were born old and will
never understand them. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t always this bitter,
self-righteous bitch that I am. I was young, pretty, carefree and risk taking
like her; who used to sneak out at night to try cigarettes and watch Madonna
videos. And her dad was handsome, slim, funny, charming, confident guy who used
to debate professors to tears and steal answer copies from their desks while
they were sleeping. I wanted to tell her that whatever we advise her to do is
not something copied from a scripture or a “Morally correct mother’s guidebook”
but something that is statistically proven to yield best results. But as I said,
she wouldn’t listen to me.

Naresh was sleeping off his hangover when Kavita was ready
and out of the house. She was practically jogging and didn’t go through her
morning beauty routine, which meant she wasn’t going to school. She took an
auto and I realized to follow I had to hop on to it, so I did.

She was texting the whole time and I was having a difficult
time following what she was typing. Apparently she was informing someone of
coming over to her. It was a short drive, didn’t realize the time at all. She
got out, paid the auto guy and started walking into a thin street. The locality
looked pretty dingy, I was getting worried about her safety but she didn’t, she
took calculated confident steps, she walked up stairs and walked straight into
a house.

It was Sid, her ex-boyfriend. Or at least that’s what she
had said when I had caught her with grass in her handbag. It was her ex-boyfriend’s,
she had meant to return it, she doesn’t smoke, and it’s all over; that all was
her answer. I gave her a stern warning and a promise that I will toss her out
of the house the next time she did drugs, along with the promise that I won’t
tell Dad and she won’t see that guy again.

But she was seeing that guy again, in fact she just ran upto
him and hugged him. He was too groggy to say anything; he just held her and
tried to breathe her in, like I used to breathe Naresh in when we first used to
date. As soon as they separated she let out a scream and shouted “I’m so happy
that she is dead, you know I wasn’t convinced it was you the first time when
they told me, but then when they told me it was a hit and run by a car I was
sure it was you.”

“You know when Najeeb Bhaai first told me”, she continued “that
an SMS is going to go to the owner of the card, I was so shit scared. I thought
we were caught and like she is going to find out that I am paying to get her
ring out of mortgage from her own card.... She is very smart you know, that way my Mom.... She
was gonna come around here sniffing and she was gonna find out that I paid for our stuff from
Najeeb bhaai by mortgaging her wedding ring. She never used to wear her anyways,
just this credit card would have been the pain". "But what could I do?" She let out an question to no one in particular, "Najeeb Bhaai was after my life
to pay the money and take it back, I really had no option.”. She stopped for
breath and continued “I swear baby when I first called you about our problem I
didn’t know what could you possibly do? But killing her was the master stroke,
she is gone now. My Dad is happy, I’m happy and she is never gonna find out
about her card”. She punched in the air and lit a cigarette, or maybe it
wasn’t just a cigarette considering the stuff that was lying around in the
house. There were rubber tubes, syringes, silver foil, candles, rolling paper
and lot of other stuff present to prove that this wasn’t just another teenage boy’s house.

I let out my breath, fell on my knees and started laughing
while tears fell down my eyes. I suddenly remembered Nietzsche “Perhaps I know
best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to
invent laughter”, I couldn’t agree more. But I was happy that I was killed for
more than a few thousand rupees that my daughter had borrowed from a drug
dealer, I was killed for love. That guy Sid did it to protect Kavita from me
even though I would have done nothing so bad, I probably would have ignored
that SMS like the dozen others I ignore every day. But I was glad, there were
only two reason men waged war, money and love. And wars waged for love were
always more brutal. I was bittersweet about the whole affair, while I was just
murdered, my daughter had someone who would kill someone for her love.

As I was gloating over the whole thing when I realized that
Kavita had already left and Sid was left on bed. He crawled over to drink some
water, light a cigarette and started typing on his phone. His hands were shaky
and he had to correct a lot but in the end it read something like this “Im
sorry Ka bt it wasn’t me. It ws someone else. Bt I luv u anyways.”

God Damn! So it wasn’t him either. So maybe it was some other
random guy in that dark sweat shirt, just a random hit & run after all. Who knows?
Maybe he didn’t want a witness and me made sure by running over me twice, maybe some psychopath looking for kicks on a Tuesday night. But my gut feeling; and I still had one, didn’t
let me believe that and I still needed to know who killed me.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it. -
Ernest Hemingway